A secure chaotic cryptosystem for thermal Imaging: Logistic map-based encryption with substitution-diffusion and spatial decorrelation
Majid Khan, Fahad Aljuaydi, Lal Said, M. Ashraful Amin · Journal of Radiation Research and Applied Sciences · 2025
Thermal imaging data security is essential in critical infrastructure security, and encryption is not effective because of large correlation between pixels. In this article, a logistic chaotic map-based cryptosystem with a three substitution-box XOR-based substitution and diffusion is presented. We have added a chaotic matrix-based shuffling operation for spatial correlation elimination. Its security is confirmed by conducting rigorous analyses like histogram uniformity, correlation among neighboring pixels , mean squae error based robustness analysis, differential cryptanalysis and randomness measures with entropy. The technique ensures near optimal values of number of pixel change rate and unified average change in intensity. The resistance against plaintext sensitivity with computation efficiency qualify the suggested mechanism for the confidentiality of thermal images .